Question: What is Web 3.0? How is it different from Web 2.0?
My answer: Over the past several months, I've been trying to immerse myself in as many Web 2.0 sites I can while I have been writing an article on user-generated content (which I promise I will be sharing in beta form very soon--someone else is responsible for getting the draft online but I may just do it myself). Any regular reader of this blog knows that I have been religiously following YouTube for over a year and a half, and, by now, I probably am a YouTube expert, if there is such a thing. I also look at the other major video sharing sites and now the video sharing components of all the major networks. I try to read the reviews on Tech Crunch of the latest startups. Recently, as some of my students know (perhaps against their wishes), I started playing around more with Facebook to see for myself what all the hype is about (I'll do a post later on Facebook).
Today, though, I want to start jotting down some thoughts on where I see the Internet heading -- to the so-called Web 3.0. Eric Schmidt provided a glimpse of an answer in the video at the end of this post. I will probably have to write several posts and then aggregate them together at the end. Today's post will focus on the first feature of Web 3.0 that is already taking shape.
1. We're living in an embeddable world: The majority of all content on the Internet will become unbundled, portable, and freely embeddable throughout the Web.
We owe a lot to YouTube for popularizing this development. YouTube designed their video sharing system in a way to enable people to embed their videos throughout the Web, such as on blogs and MySpace pages. The embedded video below is just one example. Today, just about every major media content producer that posts videos online (with a few holdouts) allows people to take those professional videos and stick them in some other website. The major media companies that choose not to allow embedding of their videos do so at their peril. They are missing out on the possibility of having their content go viral.
For photographs, Flickr helped to foster the exporting and sharing of user-generated photographs, but Photobucket really took it to the next level by tagging the images into code that could be embedded into blogs and websites just like a YouTube video.
More generally, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of "widgets" that developers have made -- ranging from newsfeeds to games to music and video players -- that can be freely embedded in any website.
Why is this significant? This development runs counter to the instincts of the major media content producers, who have for a long time guarded their content like crown jewels, under lock and key. But, on the other side of the coin, the development also flies in the face of the rhetoric from the "copyleft" side that tends to see the Internet as under constant threat from major media companies that supposedly want to "lock down" culture, particularly through copyright enforcement. Just to throw out one example, although I learned a lot from reading J.D. Lasica's "Darknet" book and think it's an excellent book, its rhetoric against Hollywood is way overblown and the book misses the groundswell developments for unbundled, portable, and embeddable content that many Hollywood studios have increasingly embraced, even if, at first, begrudgingly.
